I have my FIRST wordpress website and I love it, however I'm not sure if it's my browser (Firefox 8.0.1 for Mac) or my computer or the website itself but it's going really slow.

MY SITE is in the finalizing stages and I want to make sure it's smooth. This is my first wordpress site so I can see myself adding a lot of things and maybe slowing it don that way?

First off, is it slow for you guys?

Where is a good site, plugin or article about how to determine how slow/fast your wordpress site it? Is there a handy plugin that can speed it up? Is there somewhere I can check to see how big my site it? What might be a specific thing slowing it down?

There are a lot of great suggestions here - Pingdom, Yslow (available as a Firebug for Firefox plugin), W3 Cache (WordPress caching plugin)... I'd just like to add Firebug's "Net" tab will also give you a good breakdown of each element and its load time, letting you see exactly what's going fast or slow. It loads for me in about 3-4 seconds, which isn't great but it's not as bad as some I've seen - caching should help a LOT with that.
–
SickHippieMar 2 '12 at 4:49

1

I'll be using this today to work on the readiness and speed of my website. Thanks a lot!
–
kia4567Mar 3 '12 at 18:10

Great answers below, but my personal guess would be that your hosting service is not that great. What kind of hosting do you serve the blog from?
–
julien_cMar 7 '12 at 18:39

Well now the best hosting service but it's inexpensive for the kind of clients I have. I use GoDaddy. Once I have more high profile clients I'll look into my own hosting.
–
kia4567Mar 20 '12 at 16:33

There are several factors that will make your Wordpress site slugish. One of the largest gains can be made with the W3 cache plugin, along with several other smaller fixes. Also choosing a well made theme can help with CSS & PHP bloat.